The democratic peace literature has provided rather convincing evidence that two democratic countries are very unlikely to go to war against each other. We provide an alternative for thinking about why certain pairs of states do not engage in warfare, drawing largely from feminist scholarship. That is, we explore the extent to which fertility rates and rates of women's employment are associated with the use of force by a state. We draw on literature which shows that women's attitude toward the use of force differs from those of men, to argue that the more women who have access to the political process the more constrained will be the state in its use of force. The results of our analysis demonstrate that pairs of countries with low birth rates tend not to go to war, and that the lower the birth rates the less likely is a country to become engaged in the more violent of militarized disputes.
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Address all correspondence to : Patrick Regan , Center on Democratic Performance (CDP), Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA. Tel: (607) 777-2167; Fax: (607) 777-2675; E-mail: pregan@binghamton.edu .